OpenAlex Research Papers, Authors & Institutions Export

OpenAlex is the big open catalog of scholarly research: hundreds of millions of papers, books and datasets, plus the people, institutions, journals and topics around them. It has a great API, but turning its nested JSON into something you can drop in a spreadsheet or a pipeline takes a bit of work. This Actor does that part for you.

Give it a search, a few filters, or a list of DOIs, and you get back one clean record per item: title, DOI, year, journal, every author with their ORCID and affiliations, citation counts, open access status with a link to the free copy, topics, and (if you want) the abstract as readable text.

What you can export

Pick	You get
Works	Papers, preprints, books, datasets. DOI, title, date, type, venue, authors + ORCID + institutions, citations, FWCI, OA status and URL, PDF link, topics, concepts, keywords, referenced works count, retraction flag, optional abstract
Authors	Name, ORCID, works and citation counts, h-index, i10-index, last known institutions, top topics
Institutions	Name, ROR, country, type, homepage, works and citations, h-index, top topics
Sources	Journals, repositories, conferences. ISSN, publisher, OA and DOAJ flags, APC, works and citations, h-index
Topics	Name, description, keywords, subfield / field / domain, works and citations

Filters

• Search query: full-text search. For works OpenAlex looks at titles, abstracts and full text; for everything else, names.
• Publication year range (works).
• Open access only (works and journals).
• Institutions: OpenAlex IDs like I136199984, ROR links like https://ror.org/03vek6s52, or plain names. Names get looked up and the match is written to the log, so check it. IDs are the safe bet.
• Author ORCID iDs: works by those people, or their author records.
• DOI list: pull exact works. Any format works (10.1234/abc, https://doi.org/10.1234/abc, doi:10.1234/abc).
• Extra filter: if you know OpenAlex's filter syntax, add anything else here (e.g. type:article,language:en).

Sort by relevance, most cited, newest, oldest, most works, or name. Set Max records so you don't accidentally pull a million rows.

Do I need an OpenAlex API key?

No, not to get started. Leave the key field empty and the Actor runs on OpenAlex's free keyless allowance, which is fine for trying it out and for small exports.

The catch: the keyless allowance is small ($0.10 of OpenAlex usage a day) and it's shared by everyone calling from the same IP address, which on a cloud platform can include other people. Keyless runs are also capped at 10,000 results per query. If the shared allowance runs out mid-run, the Actor stops with a clear message and keeps whatever it already saved. It doesn't try to get around OpenAlex's limits (no proxy rotation or similar).

For anything regular or bigger, add your own key. It's free: sign up at openalex.org and copy your key from openalex.org/settings/api into the OpenAlex API key field. The field is marked secret, so Apify stores it encrypted and the Actor only ever sends it to OpenAlex (in a header, never in a URL or the logs). With a key you get your own daily allowance (around $1 of API usage per day at the time of writing, which goes a long way: a page of 100 filtered works costs $0.0001 and a page of search results $0.001), fast cursor paging, and no 10,000-result ceiling.

Your OpenAlex usage is separate from what you pay on Apify. Anything OpenAlex charges for going over the free allowance is between you and OpenAlex.

Example input

{
  "apiKey": "your-openalex-key (optional)",
  "entityType": "works",
  "searchQuery": "large language models",
  "yearFrom": 2022,
  "yearTo": 2024,
  "openAccessOnly": true,
  "sort": "cited_by_count",
  "includeAbstract": true,
  "maxItems": 500
}

Example output (one work, trimmed)

{
  "entityType": "work",
  "id": "W4396721167",
  "doi": "10.1038/s41586-024-07487-w",
  "doiUrl": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07487-w",
  "title": "Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3",
  "publicationDate": "2024-05-08",
  "publicationYear": 2024,
  "type": "article",
  "venue": {"id": "S137773608", "name": "Nature", "type": "journal", "issnL": "0028-0836", "publisher": "Nature Portfolio"},
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Josh Abramson",
      "orcid": "https://orcid.org/0009-0000-3496-6952",
      "position": "first",
      "institutions": [{"id": "I4210090411", "name": "Google DeepMind (United Kingdom)", "ror": "https://ror.org/00971b260", "countryCode": "GB"}]
    }
  ],
  "authorCount": 48,
  "citedByCount": 15805,
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "oaStatus": "hybrid",
  "oaUrl": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07487-w",
  "primaryTopic": {"id": "T10044", "name": "Protein Structure and Dynamics", "field": "Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology"},
  "referencedWorksCount": 71,
  "abstract": "The introduction of AlphaFold 2 has spurred a revolution in modelling the structure of proteins..."
}

A RUN_SUMMARY record in the key-value store shows the exact OpenAlex query URLs, how many results matched, how many were saved, and how much OpenAlex usage the run spent.

A few things to know

• Abstracts. OpenAlex stores abstracts as a word index instead of plain text. The Actor puts the words back in order, so the text is readable, though now and then the spacing or punctuation is a little off. Plenty of works have no abstract at all because publishers don't share them.
• Counts change. Citation counts and topics update as OpenAlex reprocesses its data, so two runs a month apart won't match exactly.
• Odd records at the top. OpenAlex counts things like a journal's front matter or a whole conference series as "works" (type paratext), and some of them have huge citation counts, so they can show up first when sorting by citations. Add is_paratext:false (or type:article) in the extra filter to drop them.
• Duplicates. Each OpenAlex ID is saved once per run.

Pricing

Pay per event: a tiny charge when the run starts plus about $0.001 per record saved. 1,000 works costs about $1. Set a max charge on the run if you want a hard cap; the Actor stops cleanly when it's reached.

Data source and credit

All data comes from OpenAlex, built by the nonprofit OurResearch. OpenAlex data is released under CC0, so you can use it however you like, but please credit OpenAlex when you publish something built on it. This Actor isn't made, endorsed or supported by OpenAlex or OurResearch; it's an independent tool that calls their public API under their terms.